RGSSALibraryCatalogue

Monday, 27 January 2014

Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice), by Caspar Friedrich (1774-1840),inspired by William Parry's Arctic expedition of 1819-20

January
2014 was enlivened by the misadventure of the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, chartered by the Australasian Antarctic
Expedition, that got stuck in the Antarctic ice.

Maybe I
ought to stress at this point that all the opinions in this blog are mine alone
and do not represent the views of the Royal Geographical Society of South
Australia.

So I'm
gonna say this. All the interviews I saw on TV gave me the impression the "scientific"
team had no idea of the conditions they'd be facing—and gee, know what? It isn't
the first time, by any means! The whole history of polar exploration is one of
being stuck in the ice. But by the 21st
century? I'd suggest there is absolutely no excuse for this misadventure.
It's a dangerous environment, it's known to be a dangerous environment, and
anyone who blithely sails into it unprepared, never mind it's "summer,"
what a misnomer, is asking for it and shouldn't be surprised when they get it.
I see that The Australian headlined
its report of 22 January "Ship of fools": good on it. (You can read
it at http://www.sott.net/article/272363-Ship-of-fools-Icebound-expeditioners-apologise-for-Antarctic-rescue-mission
) Its comment reads: "And no, Chris Turney [the spokesperson] aka 'the
Penguin' is no experienced Antarctic scientist unless we add political
scientists and spin doctors into the equation." Zat so? Why am I not
surprised to hear it?

Of course Harry was down there at about the same time, putting himself at
risk, which is entirely his own business, but also putting the lives of those
who might have had to rescue him at risk. Thank you for that, Your Royal
Highness. It's a miracle you and your lot didn't also have to be hauled out of
it.

Perhaps it was that daft BBC David
Attenborough thing with the penguins—I'm not wholly immune to the cuteness of penguins
but by the end of it I felt I wouldn't care if I never saw another one—maybe it
was it, that made the intrepid adventurers of the Akademik Shokalskiy imagine they could get away with it. My lasting
impression of that telly saga—apart from the penguins and penguins and penguins—is
of those nits in their polar gear bent double with their cameras, while the
predicted blizzard howled in over the slope above them. Gee, guys, it wasn't
worth it in order to bring the couch potatoes of the world lovely shots of
p—Them.

If you're still with me, dear blog readers,
I can prove that the history of polar
exploration is one of getting stuck in the ice, and should be a warning to anyone
who thinks of going to either the Arctic or Antarctica: the RGSSA has got the
books that are the proof. Does anyone take account of the lessons of history
these days? ("No!" you cry.)
Never mind, here are some notes about just some of those genuine explorers who
got stuck in the ice before January 2014.

In search of the sunny Polar
Sea in the 1590s

One of
the earliest recorded Arctic voyages where the ship was icebound was that of
Willem Barentsz in the late 16th century.

Willem Barentsz's ship in the Arctic ice

Veer, Gerrit de.

The three voyages of William Barents to
the Arctic regions : 1594, 1595, and 1596. London : Hakluyt Society, 1876. (Works
issued by the Hakluyt Society ; no. 54)

Willem
Barentsz (or Barents), circa 1550-1597, was a 16th-century Dutch navigator,
cartographer and explorer. The Barents Sea, Barentsburg and Barents Region are
named after him. Starting off in life as a cartographer, he sailed to Spain and
the Mediterranean, compiling an atlas of the Mediterranean region, which he
co-published with Petrus Plancius. His career as an Arctic explorer was spent
searching for the Northeast Passage to the East: his reasoning was that north
of Siberia there must be open water, free of ice, since the sun shone 24 hours
a day up there. Don’t laugh—this was pretty good for the time: it was only 50
years since Copernicus's death and Galileo would only have been in this
thirties and had not yet done his greatest work. Barentsz made three Arctic
voyages in search of the Passage, in the course of which he discovered Bear
Island and Spitsbergen, had more than one bloody confrontation with polar
bears, and became stuck in the polar ice. A crewmember, Jan Huyghen van
Linschoten, published an account of the first two voyages.

During the third voyage, in ships captained by
Jan Corneliszoon Rijp and Jacob van Heemskerk under Barentsz's command, Gerrit
de Veer, the ship's carpenter, whose account of Barentsz's voyages is held by
the RGSSA, was the first person to witness and record the atmospheric anomaly
known as the "Novaya Zemlya effect," or "rectangular sun",
a polar mirage in which the sun seems to be rising too soon and appears as a
line or a square. (See http://www.eh2r.com/mp/data3.html
for more information & some extraordinary images.) Barentsz died during this
last voyage.

Some of the RGSSA's rare early publications
also contain material on Barentsz, notably:

This
early classic set of voyages contains 3 works. It is the third item, Descriptio regionis Spitzbergae, which
is concerned with Barentsz; it is: "A geographical description of
Spitzbergen and a refutation of the claims of the English to the northern whale
fisheries, with the journal of the voyage of Willem Barentsz and Jan
Corneliszoon Rijp in 1596."

Northwest Passage and
English obsession

Northwest Passage routes, based on a NASA photograph

By the
end of the 18th century, in the wake of the voyages of Cook and Vancouver,
British interest in the polar regions had awakened. The earlier part of the
19th century saw a huge explosion in British polar exploration, more especially
in the Arctic. They became obsessed with finding the Northwest Passage. The original
impulse was the cash nexus: the passage would be a faster way to the riches of
India and the Far East than sailing round Africa. As the Pacific began to be
properly explored in the late 18th century, the fabled Passage also offered a
tempting faster way to the Pacific itself, rather than the risky and terrifying
voyage round Cape Horn. At least, that's pretty much the official line. But
once you start looking at account after account of yet another British
expedition—usually Royal Navy vessels—setting off for the far north, you can't
help but realise that after a while these efforts had little or nothing to do
with trade. This was an obsession in full flower.

Parry: early successes in
spite of the ice

William
Parry must have been an extraordinary man. He was most certainly an able navigator,
and an excellent expedition leader. The RGSSA has catalogued 4 of his books of
Arctic exploration, published from 1821 to 1828, covering his voyages which
began in 1819. The context? At home they were wearing high-waisted muslin
dresses and reading Jane Austen's Persuasion,
just published the year before. Can you imagine what it must have been like,
setting off for the frozen polar wastes in a small wooden sailing ship in 1819?
Look how the ice dwarfs her!

Parry's ship Hecla in Baffin Bay, on his 1819-1820 expedition:foreground, a small boat desperately pulls her away from the giant iceberg

Parry, William Edward, Sir, 1790-1855.

Journal of a voyage for the discovery
of a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific : performed in the
years 1819-20, in His Majesty's ships Hecla and Griper, under the orders of
William Edward Parry. London : John Murray, 1821

One of
the most successful of all the searches for a Northwest Passage was one of the
earliest. On the first voyage under his command Parry sailed straight through Lancaster
Sound, with his two ships, Hecla and Griper, and reached Melville Island. It
would be more than 30 years before another ship would get that far. Being the
first ship to cross the 110° longitude line won him a £5000 reward offered by
the Board of Longitude. Hecla and Griper were the first British ships to
winter over in the Arctic, when they were frozen in at Winter Harbour, Melville
Island. Many of the landmarks of the Arctic region whose names we see today
were named by Parry on this first amazing voyage: Melville Island, Barrow
Strait, Beechey Island.

Parry, William Edward, Sir, 1790-1855.

Journal of a second voyage for the
discovery of a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific : performed
in the years 1821-22-23 in His Majesty's ships Fury and Hecla, under the orders
of Captain William Edward Parry. London : John Murray, 1824

This
second attempt to find the Northwest Passage was made through Foxe Channel and
Frozen Strait, north of Hudson Bay, but it did not succeed in finding a way
west. This time Parry's ships, Fury
and Hecla, were frozen in for two
years. His narrative is remarkable for detailed observation of the Inuit—the “Esquimaux,”
as they called them. It was another first for Parry. The accompanying
illustrations by George Lyon, commanding Hecla,
help to flesh out this early contribution to the anthropology of the Arctic.

Parry, William Edward, Sir, 1790-1855.

Journal of a third voyage for the
discovery of a North-West passage : from the Atlantic to the Pacific :
performed in the years 1824-25, in His Majesty's ships Hecla and Fury. London : John Murray, 1826.

On his
third trip, again with Hecla and Fury, Parry again went through Lancaster
Sound, following the route of his first voyage, and then turned south through
Prince Regent's Inlet. However, the going was almost immediately blocked by pack
ice. They spent a winter at Port Bowen on the eastern shore. They tried to
struggle on the next year, but lost Fury
to the ice on a beach on Somerset Island, on the western side of the Inlet: Fury
Beach. The ship had to be abandoned and the two crews got home in Hecla.

Parry, however, was not discouraged, and
his fourth Arctic voyage, of 1827, is chronicled in his Narrative
of an attempt to reach the North Pole : in boats fitted for the purpose and
attached to His Majesty's ship Hecla in the year MDCCCXXVII. (London :John Murray, 1828). This time Parry decided
to head north over the Pole. The heavy pack ice had prevented earlier attempts
from getting further than Spitsbergen. Rather than risk getting another ship
irretrievably stuck in the polar ice, Parry decided to use 2 sledge-boats,
which he named Enterprise and Endeavour. They were small enough for
the explorers to tow them over the ice on runners, but seaworthy enough for the
open sea. Hecla made it to Walden
Island, north of Spitsbergen, and the party carried on with the sledge-boats.
In spite of the very hard going in the face of the southerly flow of the ice floes
they got as far north as Latitude 82°45’, a record that was not broken for
nearly 50 years. The cold defeated them and they turned back. They had,
however, ruled out the existence of a way to the North Pole from the eastern
side of Greenland.

Beechey, a practical man from
a family of artists

Good judgment,
good seamanship or just good luck? Beechey's ship HMS Blossom (what a lovely name for an Arctic explorer's ship!) became
icebound in 1826, but he providently had loaded a small schooner aboard (which
he called a "barge") and was able to use it to keep pushing ahead. It
was seaworthy, could sail in close to the shore, having little draught, and at
need could be towed across the ice.

Braving the ice: Beechey's "barge"

Peard, George, 1783-1837.

To the Pacific and Arctic with Beechey
: the journal of Lieutenant George Peard of H.M.S. Blossom, 1825-1828.

Cambridge : Published for the Hakluyt
Society at the University Press, 1973. (Works issued by the Hakluyt Society ;
Second series, no. 143)

Frederick
William Beechey (1796-1856), whose father and brother were artists, was already
an experienced Arctic explorer when in 1825 he was given command of HMS Blossom to explore the Arctic,
approaching through the Bering Strait, and then meeting up with John Franklin.
In July 1826 Beechey reached Kotzebue Sound, their meeting point, but Franklin
was not there. Beechey continued on, passing Icy Cape, the furthest point
reached by Captain Cook. With Blossom
blocked by ice, Beechey's barge was able to reach a major headland, which he
later named Point Barrow: the northernmost point on the American continent west
of Boothia. There was no sign of Franklin, however, and so they turned back.
Beechey's own account, Narrative of a
Voyage to the Pacific and Berings Strait to Co-operate with the Polar
Expeditions, 1825-1828,
appeared in 1831.

Icebound and lost forever

The
name "Sir John Franklin" has become synonymous with British Arctic
exploration of the first half of the 19th century—not because of his success
but because of the disaster of his vanishing complete with ships and men. Years
later a few remains were found, but it's a very long story and I shan't go into
it now.

Franklin led several polar expeditions: the
RGSSA holds his Narrative of a journey to the shores of the
Polar Sea in the years 1819, 20, 21 and 22(London: John Murray, 1823) and
his Narrative of a second expedition to the shores of the
polar sea, in the years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (London: John Murray, 1828).

He seems to have been the sort of naval
officer, only too common at the time, who could not see his crew as fellow
human beings. The 1819-1822 venture was an overland expedition to explore the
northern coast of Canada east from the mouth of the Coppermine River. The party
explored some 320K of coastline, but Franklin fatally delayed the return
journey until the food supply was exhausted, and 11 men died of starvation or
suicide, having been reduced to eating lichen. It is known that Franklin and
his fellow officers did not help the men to carry supplies or hunt for game.
Lowering oneself in such a way might have been considered unworthy of a commissioned
officer, but under these conditions it frequently led to disaster.

On his second venture Franklin was better
prepared, with several special ocean-going small boats. They went along the
Mackenzie River to the northern coast, where they split into 2 parties, one
party heading east, and Franklin going westwards in 2 boats, Lion and Reliance, hoping to meet up with Beechey at Kotzebue Sound (see above).
Franklin, however, ran into heavy ice and could not get through it to the
rendezvous.

Franklin's small boats, Lion & Reliance, in the ice

This
venture was much more successful than the previous one: they mapped over 1200
miles of Arctic coastline, leaving only two strips left unsurveyed.

Franklin's was a varied career: from 1836
to 1843 he was lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). But by 1845
he was in the Arctic again, in command of an expedition to discover the
Northwest Passage. The expedition ships, Erebus
and Terror, with 138 officers and
men, were last seen by a whaling vessel on July 26, 1845, in Baffin Bay. The
ice had won.

Gone but not forgotten

After Franklin's
expedition in search of the Northwest Passage disappeared completely somewhere
in the frozen north, the British obsession with the Passage got worse, not
better. True, his widow, Jane, Lady Franklin, campaigned unceasingly for rescue
expeditions to be sent out, and the official line is that her efforts worked.
Well, yes, to some extent, no doubt: but personally, my mind boggles at the
idea of the Lords of the Admiralty taking much notice of any female, however
wellborn and well connected. No. By this time, it had become an idée fixe, and the British authorities
had too much invested in the notion, both materially and psychologically, to
let it go. Besides, what if some dashed foreigner found the Passage first?

You don’t believe me? Assimilate this: the RGSSA Library holds 21
contemporary accounts of voyages in search of Franklin—and remember, the
collection is still only half catalogued!

The men
who went in search of Franklin pretty well composed a litany of the good, the
bad and the very ugly—a real cross-section of the naval officers of the era.
Good or bad, however, they were still at the mercy of the polar ice. The ways
in which they dealt with it say quite a lot about their characters.

Stuck in the ice—but yes!
There is a Northwest Passage!

"Critical position of H.M.S. Investigator. On the North Coast of Bering Island,August 20 1851" by Samuel Gurney Cresswell

It was Robert
McClure who discovered the seaway between the furthest reaches of the Pacific
and the Atlantic Oceans in far north Canada, as documented in his book, first
published in 1856 and rapidly republished the next year:

McClure's
arduous journey was made by sledge over the pack ice as well as by ship. It
would be another 55 years before a navigator, Roald Amundsen, would sail the
Northwest Passage.

This expedition is represented in some of
the most iconic pictures of Arctic exploration, in:

Cresswell, Samuel Gurney, 1827-1867

A series of eight sketches in colour
(together with a chart of the route), by Lieut. S. Gurney Cresswell, of the
voyage of H.M.S. Investigator (Captain M'Clure), during the discovery of the
North-West Passage. London : Day and Son, 1854

McClure
(sometimes M'Clure) was a very able navigator, and, unlike far too many ships'
captains of the time, a kindly and caring man. He had gone into the Royal Navy at
17, in 1824, and his first voyage to the Arctic, in 1836, was as mate on Terror under the command of George Back.
It was his first experience of being stuck in the ice: the ship became icebound
and damaged, but eventually limped back to Britain. In 1848 McClure again
headed for the polar regions, as First Lieutenant on Enterprise, one of the ships of the first expedition to find John
Franklin, under Sir John Ross.

1850
saw the launch of a new expedition in search of Franklin, under the command of
Richard Collinson, on Enterprise.
McClure was captaining the second ship, Investigator.
They sailed south together to Cape Horn and reached the Pacific, but became
separated and lost touch completely. McClure continued with the mission, taking
Investigator all the way north to the
Bering Strait and along the coast of Alaska. He was the first European to land
on Banks Island in the far north of Canada; from there he sailed north, naming
the strait between Banks Island and Victoria Island the Prince of Wales Strait.

Winter
closed in and Investigator became
stuck in the ice. McClure's sledging parties, however, went eastwards from the
Prince of Wales Strait to Viscount Melville Sound, confirming that this was the
seaway to the east. This was significant, for at its eastern end the sound
connects via Barrow Strait with
Baffin Bay, which is an arm of the North Atlantic Ocean. McClure's expedition
had thus found the complete Northwest Passage, though the pack ice prevented
them from sailing all the way.

When
the ice broke up in the spring of 1852 they were forced back to the west by the
ice floes. Under continual threat from the giant icebergs breaking free of the
polar ice pack, McClure sheltered in an inlet which he named Mercy Bay. Winter
was not so merciful, however, and they were iced in again, with rations growing
dangerously short. "McClure made elaborate plans for evacuating the less
healthy members [of his crew] who would be unlikely to stand the rigours of a
third winter. He had always shown a great concern for their health, delighted in
their amusements during the long hours of winter inactivity, and won their
respect and affection." (Baker, J. N. L. "McClure, Sir Robert John Le
Mesurier", Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=5136
)

In
March 1853, however, they were rescued by a sledge party from HMS Resolute, under the command of Henry
Kellett, who had read the message that McClure had left at Winter Harbour, on
Melville Island. Captain Kellett's ship was part of another Royal Naval
expedition under Sir Edward Belcher (see further below). The party sledged back
in 1854 to Beechey Island, where they joined a supply ship from Belcher's
Arctic Squadron and sailed home with the remains of Belcher's expedition.

Captain Belcher was not a
good man, he had his little ways...

Belcher's
decision to abandon his ship, HMS Assistance,
became infamous.

"H.M.S. Assistance blown out of Winter Quarters, October 1853"

Edward
Belcher's naval career had several notable high points, but not a few low ones.
He was a proud man whose inflated idea of his own abilities meant that he
refused to listen to advice when he should have. He was known for his harshness
in command: he seems to have had a cruel streak. By the time he set off for his
last Arctic voyage he had already been arraigned twice for cruelty to his crew,
and he certainly treated his wife very badly. They had only been married for 3
years when she left him in 1833, on the grounds that he had given her two doses
of VD. A long legal battle ensued, which Belcher is said to have spitefully
prolonged.

The ways of the Royal Navy being what they
were, Belcher was never kicked out for his maltreatment of his men. He was
variously punished and exonerated, and actually given a knighthood in 1843,
having distinguished himself in the battles at Canton, China, which resulted in
the ceding of Hong Kong to Britain.

In 1852 Belcher was put in charge of an
expedition of five ships to search for traces of Franklin. Belcher's Arctic
Squadron was to become known for its failures.

Belcher, Edward, Sir, 1799-1877

The last of the Arctic voyages : being
a narrative of the expedition in H.M.S. Assistance under the command of Captain
Sir Edward Belcher, C.B., in search of Sir John Franklin, during the years
1852-53-54. London : Lovell Reeve, 1855

The
geography of these Arctic voyages is really hard to follow—especially since a
large part of the time the mariners weren't contending with geographical
features, they were contending with the ice! So, as I have spent hours puzzling
over the maps, I'll just say here that Belcher sailed into Arctic waters from
the east, heading in from the direction of Baffin Bay via Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait, and established a base on
the small Beechey Island in far north Canada, just off the southwest corner of
Devon Island. You can see its position on the map below:

Wintering
over in the Arctic during 1853, Assistance
and her steam tender, HMS Pioneer,
were frozen in by September of that year. Efforts were made to free them by
blasting the ice with gunpowder, but without success. On 25 August 1854 Belcher
abandoned Assistance in the ice off
Bathurst Island. He then ordered the abandonment of all the expedition ships to
the ice, ignoring the strong objections of Captain Kellett of Resolute. All crews were ordered back to
the transport ships at Beechey Island. From there they eventually got home.

This disaster—like some others!—was far
from entirely the fault of the treacherous polar conditions. Pride usually
comes before a fall, and this is a prime example. "Belcher must take part
of the blame ..., for he refused to take the advice of skilled Arctic
navigators ... and as a result blundered into the heaviest ice." (Stuart-Stubbs,
Basil. "Belcher, Sir Edward," Dictionary of Canadian Biography
online. http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?id_nbr=4819
)

Back in England Belcher once again had to
face a court martial: this time for abandoning his ships. He was acquitted when
he showed that his orders had given him complete discretion during the expedition.
Nevertheless his reputation as a seaman and expedition leader was irretrievably
damaged. Thinking of his poor wife, I can't say I'm sorry.

Using and beating the ice:
Scandinavian strategists

By the
end of the 19th century we are in the era of well-prepared, seasoned
Scandinavian polar exploration. These explorers knew they were at the mercy of
the ice, but they also knew how to deal with it.

Stuck in the ice as a strategy:
Nansen's Fram, 1893-1896

Nansen, Fridtjof, 1861-1930.

Farthest north, being the record of a
voyage of exploration of the ship Fram, 1893-96, and of a fifteen months'
sleigh journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen. London : Newnes, 1898

The
Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had decided to try to reach the North Pole
by using the east-west current of the Arctic Ocean. Other polar explorers
scoffed at the notion: nevertheless Nansen took his ship Fram to the New Siberian Islands in the eastern Arctic Ocean and
froze her into the pack ice, waiting for the drift to carry her towards the Pole.

Fram in the ice, March 1894

After
18 months nothing much had happened: Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left the ship
with a team of dogs and sledges and made for the Pole on foot. They didn't reach
it, but they achieved the record "Farthest North" latitude,
86°13.6'N. They then retreated safely to Franz Josef Land in north-western
Russia.

The experiment was not a total failure. The
good ship Fram was moving, but very
slowly. She continued drifting westwards, finally emerging in the North
Atlantic Ocean. Nansen would retire from exploration after this, concentrating
on the study of oceanography, then a new science. His scientific observations
during the Fram Expedition made a
significant contribution to the discipline, proving "conclusively that
there were no significant land masses between the Eurasian continents and the
North Pole." The concept of a vast polar sea of course dates back at least
as far as Barentsz—though by the 19th century explorers no longer expected it
to be ice-free under the influence of the midnight sun. This, however, was
scientific proof.

Nansen was an extremely intelligent man who
did his research and worked out his strategies in advance. You can read his
determination and intelligence in his face, in this striking photo from the
collection of the U.S. Library of Congress:

Unlike
some, he also had a thorough knowledge of Arctic conditions, and "the
methods of travel and survival he developed with Johansen influenced all the
polar expeditions, north and south, which followed in the subsequent three
decades." ("Nansen's 'Fram' expedition", Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nansen%27s_Fram_expedition
)

Icebound but not abandoned:
Amundsen's success

Amundsen's Gjøa safe at Nome, Alaska, 31 August 1906

Amundsen, Roald, 1872-1928.

Roald Amundsen's "The North West
passage" : being the record of a voyage of exploration of the ship
"Gjöa" 1903-1907. London : Constable, 1908

The
famous Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen had already had a lot of Arctic
experience well before he reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. He also
located the North Magnetic Pole and navigated the fabled Northwest Passage from
the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the first successful voyage right through
the Passage. It was during his voyage in the Gjøa, when he spent two winters at King William Island in the
Canadian Arctic calculating the exact position of the North Magnetic Pole, that
he became icebound:

"By late September [1903] Gjøa was west of the Boothia Peninsula
and began to encounter worsening weather and sea ice. Amundsen put her into a
natural harbour on the south shore of King William Island; by October 3 she was
iced in. There she remained for nearly two years, with her crew undertaking
sledge journeys to make measurements ... and learning from the local Inuit
people." ("Gjøa", Wikipedia)

Amundsen travelled 800 km overland to the
telegraph at Fort Eagle, Alaska, to announce success. He then went all the way
back to the Gjøa, rescued her, and
sailed her all the way to San Francisco. He had timed it right: his experience
of polar conditions had allowed him to triumph over the murderous grip of the
ice. It would be a large contributing factor in his beating the British
expedition under Scott to the South Pole.

Icebound in the South

You can
be an experienced polar explorer but still be caught by the ice—as Shackleton's
second expedition to Antarctica more than proved.

Shackleton's Endurance stuck in the Antarctic ice

Shackleton, Ernest Henry, Sir,
1874-1922

The heart of the Antarctic : being the
story of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907-1909. London : W. Heinemann,
1909

Shackleton, Ernest Henry, Sir,
1874-1922

South : the story of Shackleton's last
expedition 1914-17. London : Century, 1991

Shackleton
was one of the most famous British Antarctic explorers of the early 20th
century. In 1907 he commanded the first official British attempt to reach the
South Pole, the British Antarctic Expedition. He broke the record, reaching Latitude
88°23'S in early 1909, but had to turn back when he ran out of supplies. During
this expedition his party also achieved a climb of Mount Erebus. Shackleton was
knighted on his return.

His next expedition, the Imperial
Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917) was an attempt to make the first land
crossing of Antarctica, from the Weddell Sea (off the South Atlantic) to the
Ross Sea (off the South Pacific). Before the explorers could reach the coast
their ship, Endurance, became stuck
in the pack ice. After ten months the ship broke up and sank, and the crew
drifted in an open boat for another five months before reaching Elephant
Island, north of the Antarctic Peninsula. A small group rowed some 1,600K to
South Georgia, where Shackleton was able to summon help.

Images
of Endurance in the ice are some of
the best known in the history of Antarctic exploration. But they don’t seem to
have suggested that, even if it's now a hundred years on, no-one is
invulnerable, do they?